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How Neal Brown’s power-option run game will make Arch Manning more dangerous

On3 imageby:Ian Boyd•about 10 hours•

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Arch Manning
Arch Manning (Will Gallagher/Inside Texas)

How often is Texas going to let Arch Manning run the football in 2025?

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That’s one of the big questions for the upcoming Texas Longhorn season. In 2.5 starts in 2024 he ran the ball 10 total times for 82 yards at 8.2 ypc with two touchdowns. That’s only three carries per game and many of them were scrambles. However later in the year Steve Sarkisian deployed a Manning run game package designed for short-yardage which saw the young quarterback execute a fairly wide array of schemes in which he demonstrated quite a bit of agility and power.

Texas’ new analyst Neal Brown knows a thing or two about designing a run game for a dual-threat starter. The West Virginia Mountaineers were led by Garrett Greene for the last two seasons and he produced 772 yards on 120 carries in 2023 at 6.4 ypc with 13 rushing touchdowns. In 2024 he ran it 134 times for 734 yards at 5.5 ypc with another six scores. Pretty reasonable in terms of volume and certainly efficient.

In recent Texas history, Sam Ehlinger went over 160 carries in his two full seasons in 2018 and 2019. Vince Young averaged 152 carries per year over three seasons. Quinn Ewers ran the ball 140 times in three years as a starter for -59 rushing yards and eight touchdowns. Of those 140 “rushes,” 69 of them were sacks (hence the low yield rushing yardage), so Ewers was really only trying to run the ball about twice a game and almost always on scrambles.

Greene averaged 10 carries per game in 2023 and 12 in 2024, Ehlinger averaged about 12. What if Manning were to be around 6-8 per start? That’d push him over 100 in the event of a playoff-run. If Sark was to allow Manning to get involved enough in the run game to approach 100 carries in 2025, what sorts of schemes would they use to make it happen? Any that Brown could contribute toward?

Zone-option

Texas has already run a fair bit of zone-read with Manning and it’s an obvious boon to the run game and overall system. You can mix it in on the backside of a spread foration zone play…

…or from a power set with a lead blocker escorting the quarterback to the edge:

Texas rarely needs to run these zone-reads, just doing so every now and again will introduce hesitation for opponents, particularly the backside end and linebacker who can’t plug as aggressively in the cutback lanes if the quarterback is a threat to get around them for a long score. Sark could also dial them up situationally on a 3rd down or red zone situation.

Power-option

Texas mixed in a few power run concepts with Manning late in the year but for Brown and West Virginia it was a staple of their offense while Greene was at the helm.

Greene was 5-foot-10, 200 pounds and thus built comparably to a running back when it came to running between the tackles. The first example above has the running backs threaten the backside of the play with a sweep while Greene runs frontside behind two pulling linemen executing the “kick out and lead” combination that defines gap blocking. In the second, the running back threatens the backside without a lead blocker while Greene follows the guard and tight end to pay-dirt.

Our next example is essentially the same, except the running back will threaten the perimeter not with a sweep but a swing screen:

The second example is the classic power-read. Instead of the “kick out and lead” blocking combination of a normal gap run, there is no kickout block on the end. You send an outside sweep threat to the unblocked end’s side and if the end gets wide to stop it, the quarterback pulls the ball and runs behind a lead blocker (the pulling guard). If the end stays inside to protect against an inside run, the quarterback hands off to the sweep.

If your quarterback is agile enough to hit the quickly opening and closing interior lanes these schemes create and if he’s powerful and sturdy enough to handle the blows waiting for them in said interior lanes, these schemes are extremely effective. Power-option plays often flip the idea of using the quarterback to provide a constraint to free up the running back into using the running back as a distraction in order to feature the quarterback as the inside runner. This isn’t what anyone had in mind for Manning out of high school… but the kid is 6-foot-4 and 225 pounds and hardly unnatural taking the ball inside.

Sark could consult with Brown on mixing in some quarterback run and power-option during 2025 if the Longhorns wanted to go down that path. It seems likely they would if only as an extra gear for the big games such as Ohio State, Red River Shootout, Georgia, or (hopefully) any playoff contests.

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I don’t think we’ll see a full blown option attack at Texas next year, but it would hardly be surprising if the offense had a heavier dose of spread-option and quarterback run game with Brown and Manning involved.

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